The 115th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment was primarily recruited in late 1861 and in the first few months of 1862. Its members enlisted for three years. As a three-year volunteer regiment raised by a state prior to the use of conscription, it was the kind of regiment which did much of the Union's best fighting in the war.

The process of raising troops in the Civil War bore little resemblance to the way the military was provisioned with troops during most of the 20th century. The conscription which supplied the World War II Army stayed in effect for nearly thirty years, through periods of war and peace. Even after the draft ended in the early 1970's, the United States still maintained a much larger standing army relative to the size of the nation's population than was the case in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the various National Guard and reserve units of the late 20th century are both larger and better trained than their distant counterparts in the militias of the mid-19th century.

In the beginning of 1861, by contrast, the entire regular U.S. Army had fewer than 16,000 men, most of whom were located west of the Mississippi.⁽¹⁾ The state militias were by this time mostly volunteer organizations, unlike earlier in the 19th century when universal militia service had been the rule. But as early as the 1830's, the state militias were "a peacetime joke," more social than military, and their musters were "the occasion for a drinking holiday."⁽²⁾

Once war appeared imminent in the spring of 1861, President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers. This call took the form of request to the state governors for 75,000 ninety-day militiamen. It occurred the day after Fort Sumter was surrendered in April 1861. Not long afterward, on May 3, Lincoln requested three-year volunteers for the first time. This first request was for 42,000 such volunteers; at the same time he authorized that the regular army be more than doubled by adding 23,000 men.

Even these numbers, quite large for the times, were soon increased tremendously. By the time of the July 1861 session of Congress, a mere two months after the request for 42,000 volunteers, Lincoln had requested Congress to authorize the recruitment of 400,000 more three-year volunteers. Congress authorized 500,000, and the total number who actually volunteered eventually came to 700,000. The 115th Pennsylvania was part of this 700,000 raised as a result of Congressional action in the middle of 1861.

Even though these volunteer enlistments were for three years, most of the enlistees probably doubted they would be in the Army for anywhere near that long. In 1861, the general impression was that the imminent conflict would be quickly over. As has often been noted, many in the North thought that one good battle would result in the defeat of the Confederacy and the restoration of the Union. The battle that might have fit this idea was the first Battle of Bull Run, fought on July 21, 1861, about three months after Fort Sumter. Unfortunately for the Union, however, the Confederates won a decisive tactical victory. The Union troops did more than simply lose a battle: their disorganized flight back into Washington, 25 miles to the rear, left open the possibility that the Confederates would soon enter and seize the capital itself. The authorization by Congress of the recruitment of 500,000 volunteers predated the first Battle of Bull Run by a short time, but the shock to the Union which resulted from the loss of that battle provided much of the impetus for the actual raising of the troops.

The 115th Pennsylvania was recruited toward the end of the first and strongest wave of volunteerism which the Civil War produced in the North, that is, the call issued in the summer of 1861 for 500,000 volunteers, and which eventually produced 700,000. While there were eventually 215 numbered Pennsylvania regiments in all, the 115th Pennsylvania was one of the last Pennsylvania regiments to be organized under the 1861 call for volunteers. Only one or two other Pennsylvania regiments were organized after the 115th and before the June 1862 request for more troops. Beginning with the 119th Pennsylvania Regiment, all later regiments were organized in August 1862 or later.

The second wave of recruitment was the call by Lincoln for 300,000 more troops after McClellan's retreat from the vicinity of Richmond in June 1862.⁽³⁾ By this time, enthusiasm for enlisting had begun to wane, and Secretary of War Stanton in August issued a call for still another 300,000 troops, although these were to be 9-month militiamen rather than three-year volunteers. These quotas were filled by the states primarily because of the known possibility that conscription would occur if not enough volunteers came forward. Still, of the 600,000 requested, only about 508,000 eventually volunteered. Most of these (421,000) were three-year enlistees, and the remaining 87,000 were 9-month militia volunteers. In addition to the possibility of conscription, these troops were also motivated by the payment of $100 enlistment bounties by some states.

Well before early 1863, the flow of new recruits (as opposed to re-enlistments) had largely stopped. It became clear that conscription, or a draft, would be necessary to maintain the Army's numbers.⁽⁴⁾ The known possibility of a draft had no doubt served to increase the number of voluntary enlistments or re-enlistments in the second half of 1862, but eventually this stimulus ran its course. As a result, after July 1863, a portion of the Union Army consisted of draftees or paid substitutes. Even the volunteers who enlisted or re-enlisted in 1863 or later were soldiers whose enthusiasm to volunteer was heightened by both the threat of the draft and the payment of a bounty. By the fall of 1863, the federal government itself was paying $300, or half a workingman's annual wage, as a bounty for three-year volunteers. In addition to soldiers paid in this way, there were also the substitutes who were paid $300 by more wealthy draftees and who took the draftee's place in the service.

From all of this it can be seen that the 115th Pennsylvania, while far from being the first regiment of volunteers from Pennsylvania, was still a regiment whose troops volunteered without monetary incentive or compulsion. These soldiers who freely volunteered comprised most of the Union Army through the Battle of Gettysburg. In general, they thought those who followed them were a lesser class of soldier. A typical example is found in the dedicatory oration for the Gettysburg monument of the 17th Maine, where the speaker noted that the Gettysburg battle was fought "entirely by troops who had voluntarily enlisted for the defense of their country. No conscript or bounty jumper aimed here his unwilling musket at his country's foes." The same speaker then described draftees and bounty enlistees as "the lame, the halt, the deaf, the blind, and the aged" and as "levies from the slums of the cities and the jails of the counties."⁽⁵⁾ In truth, not all of the volunteers were good soldiers and not all of the draftees were poor ones, but there were enough draftees and bounty men who were poor soldiers to make the general feeling correct as a general rule.

The specific procedures used in raising volunteer regiments during the first year of the Civil War were a far cry from the monolithic federal draft which would occur at the start of a major war today. Typically, prominent citizens would get approval from the governor of their state to recruit a regiment. They would then open a recruiting office and perhaps hold recruiting rallies. Once approximately one hundred men had signed up, they were formed into a company. The company would elect its officers (captain and lieutenants), and the company officers would elect the regimental officers (colonel, lieutenant colonel and major). Usually, the colonel would be the person who had initiated the recruitment of the regiment. It was also the general rule that a regiment would be recruited from the same geographic region; sometimes a regiment would consist largely or totally of one ethnic group, such as Irish-Americans or German-Americans.⁽⁶⁾

Little information about the specifics of the recruitment of the 115th Pennsylvania has so far been located. Col. Robert Emmett Patterson, who was to be the 115th's first commanding officer, selected his officers and began recruiting on November 6, 1861.⁽⁷⁾ In addition to Col. Patterson, the field officers included Lt. Col. Robert Thompson and Maj. Frank Lancaster. The regiment had a decidedly Irish flavor to it, as shown by the names of many of the soldiers and by the Celtic harp on one of the regimental flags, but the regiment never consisted exclusively of Irish soldiers.

Col. Patterson was almost surely the best soldier who led the regiment during its history, but circumstances were to decree that he would not be present with the regiment during any of its major engagements. Col. Patterson was born in 1830 and died in 1903.⁽⁸⁾ He was the son of Major General Robert Patterson (1792-1881), a native of Ireland and an officer in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, as well as in the first few months of the Civil War. Col. Patterson was an 1851 graduate of West Point, finishing roughly in the middle of his class of 42 men.  He resigned as a first lieutenant in 1857 to go into the cotton business in Philadelphia.  When the Civil War began, Col. Patterson rejoined the Army, serving as Paymaster in Washington.

It appears that the 115th Pennsylvania was intended to be a successor to the 24th Pennsylvania, a 90-day unit also known as the Second Regiment, Irish Brigade. (This was probably a short-lived Pennsylvania Irish Brigade, and not the more famous New York Irish Brigade which served throughout the war.) The 24th mustered in at Philadelphia on May 1, 1861. It went to western Maryland, where it saw little or no action, and returned to Philadelphia, where it was mustered out on August 10, 1861.

The organization of the 24th Pennsylvania remained intact, and several months after its muster-out, Captain Peter O'Murphy, commandant of the regiment, and the Boardof Officers of the regiment, asked Governor Curtin of Pennsylvania to appoint Col. Patterson to take command of the regiment. The reason for this request was "the necessity of having an experienced and reliable officer to take command of the regiment, so that it may with credit fulfil the end for which it was organized, the sustaining of the Federal Union and the credit of the State of Pennsylvania."⁽⁹⁾Col. Patterson must have been appointed soon after this, because three weeks later he was in Philadelphia, trying to tie up a bureaucratic loose end which was preventing the muster of men into the unit, which Patterson referred to as "the Irish Regiment."⁽¹⁰⁾

Recruiting for the 115th Pennsylvania occurred primarily in the Philadelphia area.⁽¹¹⁾ The seven Philadelphia companies were mustered in at the rate of about one company a month from January to early July. In March 1862, the Pennsylvania Adjutant General suggested to Governor Curtin that four companies of cavalry of the 5th Regiment, [Pa.] Irish Brigade, be changed to infantry and assigned "to some incomplete regiment, an Irish regiment being preferable."⁽¹²⁾ The back cover of the letter states that it involved "consolidating the 4 companies of Gallagher's Cavalry into the 115th Regiment," but it is unclear whether this actually took place.

The muster-in dates for the nine companies are shown in the table below. As can be seen, recruitment must have been proceeding fairly slowly by this time. This is probably a far cry from the rate at which regiments were filling up in 1861, but as noted above, this regiment was one of the last formed from the first group of volunteers.

The "official" size for a regiment was 10 companies, each of which contained 82 privates, 13 sergeants and corporals, 2 lieutenants, and a captain. In theory, a regiment accordingly consisted of about one thousand men. The 115th Pennsylvania started off for battle in the summer of 1862 as a regiment with only seven companies rather than ten, and none of the seven remained more than half full by the time the regiment left Pennsylvania in July 1862. After the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August 1862, Companies D and G joined the regiment. Company H never existed at all. The officer responsible for its recruitment, one J.H. Vosberg, resigned on June 23, 1862, stating that he was "otherwise and more satisfactorily employed."

The mere filling of a company on paper did not mean that anything like a full company would be present to take to the field. Desertion was rampant in the early days of existence of many regiments, and this one was no exception. For instance, in Company B, there were 84 names on the roll by mid-1862, but by the end of July, when the regiment was about to get close to the scene of a battle, 41, or nearly half, had already deserted. No company had as many as 50 privates present for duty when the regiment arrived in Virginia in July 1862; in other words, the regiment had only seven of the ten companies it was supposed to have, and none of those seven had much more than half the proper strength of a company. Instead of arriving at the front with 1000 men, the 115th had a number more like 400.

The 115th Pennsylvania was destined to be no more than a small regiment at all times. This was largely a result of the time period in which the regiment was recruited, and of the need to send unfilled regiments off to the front to aid in General McClellan's Peninsula Campaign.

Soon after the regiment arrived in Virginia, Col. Patterson wrote to the adjutant of the Army of the Potomac, asking to be allowed to detail someone from the regiment back to Pennsylvania to recruit enough men to fill it up. "Under the present circumstances," he wrote, "I feel as if I were a prominent assistant at a farce as a Colonel of three companies who have been in no action. I have, when a Second Lieutenant, commanded quite that many."⁽¹³⁾ He also pointed out that he expected "to have most of the company officers rejected by a board of examination shortly." This apparently did not happen; most of the officers apparently passed whatever rudimentary examination they were subjected to, an event which was to lead to major trouble for the regiment later. Patterson thought that his "seven skeleton companies" should be recast into three, either to be joined by seven newly-recruited companies, or shipped off to some other regiment, with the 115th ceasing at that point to exist. None of these ideas were taken up; the small and half-filled regiment was allowed simply to stay as it was, augmented only by two more companies added several months later.

The small size of the regiment likewise caused Col. Patterson's father to send a steady stream of letters to Harrisburg urging that it be filled up. In one letter, he noted that "it is rather mortifying that it should be so weak in numbers."⁽¹⁴⁾ In another, he pointed out that the regiment was sent off half full in order to meet the Peninsula Campaign emergency, something that "was not done with any other regiment."⁽¹⁵⁾ Certainly, as General Patterson argued, it was hard for the regiment to continue recruiting in Philadelphia when it was already in the field. This was a time when enthusiasm for enlisting was on the wane anyway, and such few as wished to enlist probably preferred to join a new regiment and serve some time in a training camp before taking to the field. All of these factors weighed against the filling of the regiment.

One suspects that once the regiment moved out from Pennsylvania, its recruiting problems no longer received the attention of the governor and the state adjutant general. The sad truth about Civil War regimental organization is that more regiments meant more patronage for political leaders. Thus, existing regiments were not refilled with fresh troops, but simply were allowed to dwindle. The steady influx of all-green regiments had another unfortunate aspect--the veterans in existing regiments could have instructed the new recruits, but the patronage system went a long way toward insuring that experienced and inexperienced soldiers did not come together in the same regiment. In the case of the 115th Pennsylvania, this is dramatically shown by the fact that only about 20 of the nearly 900 names on the roll were recruited after the companies initially formed in 1862.

In the end, the only substantial additions to the regiment once it left for the front came when Companies D and G were added during the late summer and fall of 1862. Perhaps these additions were the result of General Patterson's steady petitioning of state officials. In any event, by the time these companies joined, desertion, disease and casualties had reduced the regiment still more, so that even with the new companies, the regiment never managed to have much more that about 450 on the rolls in the field, with seldom more than 350 actually present.

Training and Drill

At present, little firsthand information about the training and drilling of the 115th Pennsylvania has been located. General information about this period in the life of a regiment can be found in many published works, such as Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank. A small amount of information about the unit's training can be found in Bates. For instance, when Company B, the regiment's first company, had been completely recruited on January 28, 1862, the training and drill of that company began in Hestonville, Pennsylvania, now a West Philadelphia location. A month later, the troops were sent to Camden, New Jersey, at a resort area known as Diamond Cottage.⁽¹⁶⁾ For the next three months, March, April and May 1862, the regiment remained in Camden, training and drilling, as the newly-recruited companies trickled in.

The regiment left its training camp at Diamond Cottage in Camden on May 31, 1862. Five days earlier, Col. Patterson had pleaded with the Adjutant General to pay the men what was due them. He wrote that paying the mens's salaries was necessary because "the families of some are absolutely starving and the large majority of the men will desert if we start [for Harrisburg] without payment."⁽¹⁷⁾ It is presently unknown whether the salaries were paid before the unit's departure for Harrisburg; while the majority of the men did not desert, the time around the departure date proved to be one of the more popular times for desertions to occur.

1. McPherson, James M., Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 163. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982).

2. Ibid., p. 164.

3. This call for 300,000 volunteers (which came after the 115^th Pennsylvania had been organized) moved the New York Quaker abolitionist James S. Gibbons to write the song, "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More."

4. Conscription had begin in the South over a year earlier; by February 1864, the Confederacy had passed a law requiring all soldiers who had enlisted for three years to remain in service for the duration of the war.

5. Maine at Gettysburg, pp. 218-219 (Portland, Maine: Lakeside Press, 1898).

6. This description of the recruitment process was drawn largely from McPherson, Ordeal by Fire, pp. 165-66.

7. Bates, History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, Vol. VI, p. 1208 (1870).

8. Boatner, Civil War Disctionary.

9. October 23, 1861 letter of Board of Officers of "2d Regiment Irish Brigade" to Curtin. Pa. State Archives.

10. November 12, 1861 letter of Col. Patterson to Col. Riddle of Pa. Adj. Gen. Office. Pa. State Archives.

11. According to Bates, p. 1208, Companies D and G were recruited primarily from Cambria, Lebanon and Lancaster Counties. In all likelihood these companies, formed later in 1862 than the Philadelphia companies, were not recruited as part of the same effort which recruited the Philadelphia companies, but instead were unattached units recruited through some other effort and then attached to the 115^th to bring it closer to the proper size for a regiment.

12. March 12, 1862 letter, Thomas to Curtin. Pa. State Archives.

13. July 29, 1862 letter of Col. Patterson to Seth Williams. National Archives, RG 93.

14. August 29, 1862 letter of General Robert Patterson to Adj. Gen. Russell. Pa. State Archives.

15. October 25, 1862 letter of General Patterson to Governor Curtin. Pa. State Archives.

16. A 1904 history of the 112^th Pennsylvania Volunteers stated that "as soon as recruits were received, they were sent to Charles G. Zimmerman's 'Diamond Cottage,' a pleasure resort in the suburb of Camden, N.J., where a rendezvous camp (Camp Angeroth) was established, and where they were drilled in the 'school of the company'." Ward, George W., History of the Second Pennsylvania Veteran Heavy Artillery, (112th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers) from 1861 to 1866 (1904).

17. May 26, 1862 letter of Col. Patterson to Adj. Gen. Russell. Pa. State Archives.